Studies indicate that humans employ attention as a mechanism for preventing sensory overload. Similar attention mechanism may be employed in humanoid robots to afford intelligent perception and response based on sensing of their surroundings. There are at least two aspects to the attention in the context of humanoid robots. First, ‘perception’ describes how to design a sensory system to extract useful sensory features from sensor signals, and perform subsequent processing to perform tasks such as face recognition. Second, ‘behavioral response’ defines how the humanoid robots should act when they encounter the salient features. The attention mechanism may enable the humanoid robots to achieve ‘perception’ and ‘behavior response’ to achieve a semblance of liveliness that goes beyond exhibiting mechanical repertoire of responses.
In most humanoid robots, sensors (e.g., cameras) cover a limited sensory field of their environments. Hence, the humanoid robots can perceive only a small subset of their environment at a certain time. To change the sensory field being covered, the humanoid robots move their platforms or components (e.g., head) into a different configuration. Panoramic attention enables the humanoid robots to retain information previously received from sensors by mapping information received from sensors to a panoramic map.
The panoramic attention may require extensive high storage and computation resources, especially to accommodate real-time operations of humanoid robots. The information received from the sensors may be extensive in size, and hence, a large amount of processing and prolonged time may be needed to perform any useful operations based on the stored information.